CSULA Department of English | Events

Poet and translator Rhina Espaillat will deliver the 27th annual Jean Burden Poetry Reading at CSULA on Monday, January 30, 2012 at 6:30 p.m. in the Golden Eagle Ballroom. Born in the Dominican Republic in 1932, Ms. Espaillat moved to the United States in 1939 and for many years taught high school English in New York City. She has published numerous essays, short stories, and poems in both English and Spanish, and she has translated English verse (most notably that of Robert Frost) into Spanish and Spanish verse (most notably that of St. John of the Cross) into English.

Her most recent collections of poems include Where Horizons Go (1998, Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize), Rehearsing Absence (2001), and Her Place in These Designs (2008). She is perhaps the only contemporary American poet to have received awards from both the Poetry Society of America and The Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic.

Since its inception in 1986, the Jean Burden Poetry Readings have brought to CSULA many of the most prominent contemporary poets in the English language, including Lucille Clifton, Wendy Cope, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Rita Dove, Anthony Hecht, Maxime Kumin, Andrew Motion, Howard Nemerov, Adrienne Rich, Vikram Seth, and Richard Wilbur.

For more information, call the Cal State L.A. English Department at (323) 343-4140.